With the explosion of the Internet, the global, internet-driven economy is motivating the burgeoning mobile data content and applications markets. Portable electronic devices such as laptop computers, cell phones, personnel digital assistants (PDA's), handheld or portable game consoles and other portable electronic devices, all use standard integrated-circuits (ICs).
The packages encase many varieties of ICs, such as microprocessors, application specific ICs, cache and system memory, and range from packaging a single ICs to multiple ICs. The considerations for packaging are generally similar. For example, packages are desired that are relatively inexpensive, are mechanically stable, are properly sized and can reliably distribute electric signals between various circuits and components while removing unwanted heat and offering protection in hostile environments.
Further, the IC packaging industry has been subject to the intense cost/performance market pressure common to the microelectronics industry. As a result of this market pressure, IC packaging has increasingly pushed the technology towards increased density, smaller form, and lower cost. The art of packaging ICs has continued to evolve and today represents a tremendous engineering challenge as IC packages become smaller and more component dense.
The latest generations of wireless products are requiring increasingly more functionality in less space, with lower weight, less power consumption, and at higher frequencies, and this is driving the utilization of smaller, fragile passive components for system-in-package (SIP) modules. Assembling these components present a number of challenges for an electronic manufacturing operation.
Thus, a need still remains to protect these fragile components in the wire-bonding phases of manufacture. In view of the ever-increasing commercial competitive pressures, along with growing consumer expectations and the diminishing opportunities for meaningful product differentiation in the marketplace, it is critical that answers be found for these problems. Additionally, the need to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and performance, and meet competitive pressures, adds an even greater urgency to the critical necessity for finding answers to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.